Institutions may manage multiple data stores that include specific information about, for example, functions, products, applications, facilities, customers, or processes within the entity. The institutions may desire to identify centrally the location, structure and operating characteristics of these data stores in order to facilitate effective data management, governance, and retrieval.
A data store is a container in which digital information is gathered and/or maintained. The information in the data store may be structured or unstructured. A data store is not necessarily a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), although this is one of the most common types of data store. It may take the form, for example, of a structured file system or hierarchical database. Moreover, a data store is not an application. Applications represent a use of information to fulfill a particular function. Many applications do maintain a set of data of concern only within the application's domain, but applications generally do not have a one-to-one relationship to individual data stores, especially in the case of shared information.
Metadata is data that provides information about other data. It is used to facilitate the understanding, use and management of data by characterizing data resources and data sets to make them understandable, relevant, findable, and controlled. Institutions with significant data stores may use metadata management products that permit definition of a common business language and describe a technical environment of data stores, including content and structure. A common business language is a standard set of reference terms with defined meanings used to describe the business processes and related data of an organization. A common business language may enable effective sharing of data across a large organization, and may be stored in a dictionary in a data store. In a complex system environment, however, multiple sources exist for the “same” data and users of these information sources, and direction may be lacking on which instance or version of the data ought to be used, and which instances should be deprecated.